Baltimore Evening Sun (5 December 1912): 6.

From the official Towel of this morning:

The [health] wardens will make the rounds of the [public] schools and will vaccinate any child whose arms do not show a scar sufficiently distinct to indicate that the vaccination was successful.

What is the League for Medical Freedom going to do about it? Opportunity knocks at its door. A chance offers to get into the newspapers and stir up the animals. Will it come to the bat?

Warning to Col. Jacobus Hook: Look out for Satan Anderson; he has another Awful Scheme up his sleeve!

The unspeakable Wegg, chorepiscopus of Havre de Grace in partibus infidelium, hangs me as high as Haman in today’s Letter Column for certain foul crimes and misdemeanors against the reverend vice crusaders, those virtuosi of piffle. In particular, he charges that I have called them “hypocrites, whited sepulchres, Pharisees, not simply mentally deluded, but morally depraved as well,” and protests that such allegations are “amazing, astounding, flabbergasting.”

I admit the justice of the verdict, provided the indictment be sound. But is it? I doubt it. It is possible, of course, that I may have flung such charges in the heat and fury of debate, but I have no recollection of them. The worst I remember ever saying of the crusaders appeared in an article printed in this place last Monday, and I suppose it is to this article that Wegg refers. A few extracts from it carefully chosen for their violence:

These gentlemen are excited fanatics, with no sound knowledge of the problem they presume to discuss, and no genuine pity for the women they essay to “save.” Moral crusading is not an altruistic enterprise: it is merely a grandiloquent form of sport. Its chief exponents do not seek the truth. They fear and avoid the truth, they revile every man who makes an honest effort to get at the truth. Their one desire is to run things to suit themselves, at whatever cost to public decency and the public security.

Harsh words, true enough, but nevertheless I see nothing in them about “whited sepulchres” or “moral depravity.” As a matter of fact, I do not believe that any of the vice crusaders are “whited sepulchres.” Oh the contrary, those that I know anything about are gentlemen of the greatest rectitude, beings of such astounding virtue that the ordinary sinner must blush to death in their presence. And neither do I accuse them of hypocrisy, even to the slightest extent. A hypocrite must be a man of sense. He must see the essential antagonism between an ideal and a reality, a theory of conduct and the weakness of frail humanity. The vice crusaders see no such antagonism. And neither do they see any antagonism between an agreeable idea and a true idea. Once they have convinced themselves that a given thing ought to be true, they immediately assert it as a fact, and proceed to launch anathemas at any person who presumes to deny it.

Herein, indeed, we behold their essential weakness, and this is the gravamen of my charge against them. They are habitual manufacturers of bogus evidence. Carried away by their craze to make the world perfect overnight—i. e., to make it agree with their own brummagem notion of perfection—they put all sorts of mountsbanks on the witness stand, and impeach indecently the testimony of honest men, and fling charges recklessly and shamelessly. Within a few weeks, for example, we have seen one of them hint darkly that the police are taking graft, entirely without evidence; and we have seen another of them charge that segregated houses of prostitution are scenes of “murder, robbery and rapine;” again without evidence; and we have seen a third accuse the police of hounding registered women, yet again without evidence; and we have seen a dozen others come forward with “facts” equally astounding and equally unsupported. And to top it all, they habitually ignore and seek to conceal the genuine evidence of men who happen to be against them, and habitually appeal to the worst prejudices and delusions of the people.

But I was talking Monday, not of vice crusaders especially, but of moral crusaders in general. All of them, I believe, are fellows to behold in suspicion, and precisely because they have no understanding of the difference between a pleasant theory and an immutable fact. Whatever the form of their propaganda—whether they denounce vivisection, or war upon the Rum Demon, or censor stage plays, or try to enforce the Blue Laws, or pursue the fallen women—they are alike remarkable for their hospitality to bogus evidence. It is useless to argue with them; they don’t want to hear you. And if, despite that indifference, you keep on arguing, they are pretty sure, soon or late, to try to put you out of action by raising a moral jehad against you. As a class, they have no sense of justice, and no sense of common fairness, and no sense of truth.

I do not “impugn the motives” of these men, as Dr. Wegg alleges. I believe that they are in earnest; that they are conscious of no unfairness and fatuity in their yammering. Even the average anti-vivisectionist, I suppose, is honest according to his lights, for all his bringing of false charges against his betters. But what I do say is that all of these fellows suffer from a defective habit of mind; that they cannot weigh evidence calmly when a moral issue is involved, that they constantly mistake their hot yearning to flay the sinner for a benign yearning to save him; that they try absurdly to reduce life to a few banal and unworkable rules. So long as they merely entertain one another with their balderdash they are not very dangerous, but if they are unopposed they tend to force public officials into foolish actions, if only because they are so free and so cruel with their penalties for dissent. And so it becomes a highly virtuous and satisfying act to take an occasional hack at them, and to diminish their prosperity by putting them on the defensive.

Such is my reply to good Wegg, that prodigy of virtue. Now let Wegg make a reply in his turn. Specifically, let him tell me just what he did for piety and virtue during the late race meeting at Havre de Grace, when his loved county of Herford was in the grip of the Goths and Huns, and holy deacons were lying down with gamblers and blacklegs, and eminent moralists were reaching out eager hands for the dirty money, and the whole country was diverted by an exhibition of hypocrisy perhaps unmatched in civilization. If Wegg is a moralist, what was he doing then?

The more the ex-Sheriffs think it over, the more they are satisfied with the way things are going.—Adv.